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Submission + - U.S. Navy Says UFOs Are Real, UFO Hunters Are Thrilled (vice.com) 2

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Vice/Motherboard writes that since the U.S. Navy admitted that its pilots encounter unidentified flying objects all the time, and mainstream news outlets like the New York Times have devoted coverage to Navy Pilots' UFO encounter stories, old UFO hunters around the world feel vindicated, and many new younger people are taking an interest in the phenomenon. For decades people who believe in UFOs, UFO lore and take UFO sightings and UFO encounters seriously have been widely ridiculed as stupid, uneducated, gullible, deluded or crazy. Now that highly trained military pilots are talking about encountering UFOs all the time and mainstream media doesn't ridicule UFO sightings anymore — this only took a few decades — a fundamental taboo appears to have been broken. UFO sightings are suddenly real, not a product of overactive imaginations, people mistaking clouds for aliens or people spreading fake news to sell books, seminars and videos. The question is, why, for so long, did mainstream media systematically ignore and ridicule a phenomenon just about everybody around the world has some knowledge of and had some exposure to? And if UFOs are "officially not crazy" now, what else that still is ridiculed by the MSM may also turn out to be "officially not crazy" in the future?

Submission + - 'Robots' Are Not 'Coming for Your Job'—Management Is (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by merbs
merbs writes: Listen: ‘Robots’ are not coming for your jobs. I hope we can be very clear here—at this particular point in time, ‘robots’ are not sentient agents capable of seeking out and applying for your job and then landing the gig on its comparatively superior merits. ‘Robots’ are not currently algorithmically scanning LinkedIn and Monster.com with an intent to displace you with their artificial intelligence. Nor are ‘robots’ gathered in the back of a warehouse somewhere conspiring to take human jobs en masse. A robot is not ‘coming for’, or ‘stealing’ or ‘killing’ or ‘threatening’ to take away your job. Management is.

Submission + - Six Years After Ed Snowden Went Public, How Much Has Changed? (counterpunch.org) 1

Submitted by Nicola Hahn
Nicola Hahn writes: In June of 2013 an intelligence specialist named Edward Snowden released a set of classified documents to journalists in Hong Kong. Ushering in a series of revelations that put mass surveillance and state sponsored hacking center stage. Snowden’s initial disclosures were soon joined by others, like the ANT Catalogue, the Equation Group tools, and the Vault 7 leaks.

In the wake of these developments a number of high-ranking officials scrambled to justify clandestine programs. Executives likewise recalibrated their stance toward the government and lawmakers worked to defend our civil liberties. Yet despite the tumult of the post-Snowden era and the debates that ensued, has it actually changed anything? Or did society merely offer a collective shrug to the looming threat of pervasive monitoring, surrendering to the convenience of mobile devices? One observer who has warily followed the aftermath of the Snowden affair believes that most people followed the latter path and that it does not bode well for civilization.

Submission + - Russian military moves closer to replacing Windows with Astra Linux (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Russian authorities have moved closer to implementing their plan of replacing the Windows OS on military systems with a locally-developed operating system named Astra Linux. Last month, the Russian Federal Service for Technical and Export Control (FSTEC) granted Astra Linux the security clearance of "special importance," which means the OS can now be used to handle Russian government information of the highest degree of secrecy. Until now, the Russian government had only used special versions of Windows that had been modified, checked, and approved for use by the FSB.

Comment Re:Invoices need to be electronic. (Score 2) 35

by Mr.No (#58108096) Attached to: Google Docs Gets an API For Task Automation

Rant.. Invoices are generated by a computer and then get typed into the receivers computer by a human. Super inefficient and prone to error. Invoices need to be electronic and this needed to happen years ago. Iâ(TM)m not talking about special cases for big business. This is a small business problem and needs to happen in atime ftware such as quickbooks without vendor lock-in.

Exactly. More than 30 years after the usage of computers in most businesses it is shocking to see 100 pages invoices being sent as PDF files and then some other company either typing them into their accounting system or attempt to OCR, push into Excel and then process. Why can't the business analysts, IT people and accounting department sit around a table? The generation of the initial PDF should surely come from an accounting system isn't it?

Submission + - Why You Shouldn't Imitate Bill Gates If You Want To Be Rich (bbc.com) 1

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: BBC Capital has an article that debunks the idea of "simply doing what highly successful people have done to get rich", because many of those "outliers" got rich under special circumstances that are not possible to replicate. An excerpt: "Even if you could imitate everything Gates did, you would not be able to replicate his initial good fortune. For example, Gates’s upper-class background and private education enabled him to gain extra programming experience when less than 0.01% of his generation then had access to computers. His mother’s social connection with IBM’s chairman enabled him to gain a contract from the then-leading PC company that was crucial for establishing his software empire. This is important because most customers who used IBM computers were forced to learn how to use Microsoft’s software that came along with it. This created an inertia in Microsoft’s favour. The next software these customers chose was more likely to be Microsoft’s, not because their software was necessarily the best, but because most people were too busy to learn how to use anything else. Microsoft’s success and market share may differ from the rest by several orders of magnitude but the difference was really enabled by Gate’s early fortune, reinforced by a strong success-breeds-success dynamic."

Submission + - Fathers Pass On Four Times As Many New Genetic Mutations As Mothers, Says Study (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Children inherit four times as many new mutations from their fathers than their mothers, according to research that suggests faults in the men’s DNA are a driver for rare childhood diseases. Researchers studied 14,000 Icelanders and found that men passed on one new mutation for every eight months of age, compared with women who passed on a new mutation for every three years of age. The figures mean that a child born to 30-year-old parents would, on average, inherit 11 new mutations from the mother, but 45 from the father. Kari Stefansson, a researcher at the Icelandic genetics company, deCODE, which led the study, said that while new mutations led to variation in the human genome, which is necessary for evolution to happen, “they are also believed to be responsible for the majority of cases of rare diseases in childhood.” In the study published in Nature, the researchers analysed the DNA of 1,500 Icelanders and their parents and, for 225 people, at least one of their children. They found that new mutations from mothers increased by 0.37 per year of age, a quarter of the rate found in men. While the vast majority of new mutations are thought to be harmless, occasionally they can disrupt the workings of genes that are important for good health.

Comment Re:Incredibly wise advice (Score 1) 120

by Mr.No (#47767891) Attached to: The Grumpy Programmer has Advice for Young Computer Workers (Video)

So live below your means and invest everything you can, so that once you hit that limit you will be financially independent.

Also, don't have kids. They cost a fortune.

And also, don't get married, because divorces tend to wipe out 50-70 percent of your net worth.

Exactly, best advice ever. If only people could have more common sense we would get out of the master/slave relationship. The 1% who own the world encourage the 99% to reproduce so that they remain enslaved to them. To hell with mankind, it can disappear as far as I'm concerned. As Mr Smith says, "Humans are a virus ..."

Comment Re: I believe it because.. (Score 5, Insightful) 291

by Mr.No (#47106015) Attached to: Parenting Rewires the Male Brain

That's just fine - you carry on believing that. The rest of us will keep on breeding. As you are removing yourself from the gene pool, your beliefs will die out with you.

Strange, I see idiots breeding like rabbits and expecting government/god to take care of the children as if they had a mission to carry on the human race while intelligent people choose to not breed because they have something between their two ears. Having children because we need them to pay for your pension is nothing short of Ponzi scheme, having above 25% unemployment among the young as in Spain, Italy just screws up these "we need more children to work and pay for retirement pensions".

Comment Re:I believe it because.. (Score 1) 291

by Mr.No (#47105823) Attached to: Parenting Rewires the Male Brain

I have been discriminated against a few times because I choose to be childless.

Completely agree with you. A male choosing to be childless is too often equated with being irresponsible which based on current cost of living and depleting resources should i fact be considered as very responsible.
IBM

Submission + - IBM Sells POS Busiiness to Toshiba (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by ErichTheRed
ErichTheRed writes: Yet another move by IBM out of end-user hardware — Toshiba will be buying IBM's retail point-of-sale systems business for $850M. I'm not an MBA, but is it REALLY a good idea for a company defined by good (and in this case high-margin) hardware to sell it off in favor of nebulous consulting stuff?? Is there really no money in hardware anymore? I doubt they'll ever sell their Power systems or mainframes off, but you never know!

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